Discovery services find use in a wide range of applications and environments. For example, discovery services may be used to locate printers in a network, websites or web services that have been made publicly available. However, in certain networks (e.g., in an Electronic Product Code (EPC) network of companies) it may be desirable to provide some degree of anonymity and authentication for various business reasons.
Competition in marketplaces may be very strong. Hence, companies are increasingly putting effort into reducing inefficiencies present in their supply chains (e.g., incorrect ordering and deliveries, low levels of shelf availability and inventory inaccuracies). However, the relevant information which may be used to address these inefficiencies is typically distributed among partners within a supply chain. The provision of access to this distributed information presents a number of technical challenges that need to be addressed in order to provide effective and efficient matching of supply and demand.
Although tight collaboration may present mutual benefits to supply chain partners, a number of technical issues may present hurdles to such collaboration. For example, in today's complex and dynamic supply chains, each company within a supply chain network may have only partial knowledge of the participation of other companies. Hence, retrieving complete information regarding a flow of goods through the network requires a high degree of effort in order to locate actors, and a technical backbone to support such retrieval of information. Further, even if a company is able to locate all relevant supply chain participants, there may be a lack of sufficient security and confidentiality controls in order to incentivize and encourage the participants to share sensitive operational data.
One initiative that attempts to address some of the issues described above is the EPCglobal Network. The EPCglobal Network, and other similar initiatives, attempt to enable an interested party to find data related to a specific item or service (e.g., a specific EPC number) and to request access to this data. This infrastructure uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, and leverages the Internet to access large amounts of information associated with Electronic Product Codes (EPCs). A component of the EPCglobal Network is a discovery service, which is a suite of services to enable supply chain participants to find EPC-related data and to request access to that data via an EPC Information Service (EPCIS). A business application may, for example, use the discovery service of an EPCglobal Network to locate EPCIS services of all EPCglobal subscribers that have information about a certain object, including EPCglobal subscribers other than the EPC manager of that object (i.e. the enterprise that issued a given EPC). Accordingly, an EPCglobal Network discovery service finds particular application in multi-party supply chains, where all participants are not known to a particular EPCIS and when it is not possible or it is impractical to “follow the chain” step by step.
Certainly, the technical challenges that are currently being faced by EPCglobal Network, specifically with respect to discovery services, are common to discovery services in other environments and applications.